


Midnight In The Railroad Yard

by jane_potter



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Gen, Gen Fic, Genderbending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-23
Updated: 2009-10-23
Packaged: 2017-10-17 04:00:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/172676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jane_potter/pseuds/jane_potter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain Christopher "Dare You To Do Better" Pike's speech mustn't have been such bullshit, actually-- either that or Jim really was as dumb as they'd always said she was-- because hell, there she was in San Fran-fucking-cisco, with nothing to her name but her bloodstained biking jacket and the grungy duffle bag over her shoulder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midnight In The Railroad Yard

**Author's Note:**

> Oh my GOD, brain. Genderswitch? _Really_? I guess I've just been seeing so much awesome alwaysagirl!Jim that I had to throw my hat into the ring or something. What came out was, actually, not the Jim-with-ovaries that I expected when I started, but a fierce, hard-edged woman with a hell of a lot of issues, a little insecure beneath her bravado and overcompensating for her lack of literal balls with reckless metaphorical ones. Is it still crack if it's a character study?

[I saw people] who wandered around and around at midnight in the  
    railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,  
    leaving no broken hearts,  
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing  
    through snow toward lonesome farms in  
    grandfather night...  
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking  
    visionary indian angels...  
who jumped in limousines...  
    on the impulse of winter midnight street  
    light smalltown rain.  
\--Allen Ginsberg, HOWL

Blearily scraping flakes of dried blood off her nose, Jim popped her keycard through the slot next to the door. She half expected it to refuse her entry and leave her stranded and lost in the middle of the Academy campus collecting stares in her bloodstained biking jacket, nothing to her name but the grungy duffle bag over her shoulder. Then Jim would have had to go track down Pike, who had just spent the last two hours droning over her shoulder as she sleepwalked through a drastically accelerated version of the way too fucking long Starfleet application process, but like _hell_ she wanted to give him the chance to jump down her throat with another fucking speech.

Therefore, it surprised her when she suddenly got lucky as hell for the first time in days and the latch clicked obligingly. Hungover and stupid with sleep-dep, Jim fumbled her way into the dorm, managing to hit a light key somewhere en route to the freshroom. Thrusting her face under the tap, she guzzled from the spray with enthusiastic abandon until her stomach was heavy with water.

When Jim finally straightened up to squint at the mirror with water dripping down her chin, feeling remotely human for the first time all day, the reflection looking back could even vaguely be called female, if not feminine. Then it became apparent exactly why cadets and recruits had been gawping all day: her skin was a funny colour of "just got off a three day bender" white, there were exhausted lines under a pair of heroically blackened eyes, and her lower lip was crusted with dark scabs in four places. Her t-shirt, now soaked at the neck, still carried a gross amount of biological traces from eighteen days of slumming from one bar to another and sleeping with a wrist cuffed to her motorcycle in backwater Iowa truck stops. That was not to even mention the stain and stink of the vomit on her pants-- not from Jim, but the guy who'd been sitting beside her on the shuttle.

Back in Spain three months ago, an outbreak of ridiculously antique parasites at the Running of the Bulls (who the hell got fucking lice any more?) had forced Jim to shear off most of her hair, leaving just a ragged fringe; now that it was growing back in, the shaggy mess tended to make her look bedraggled and boyish at best no matter what. Fortunately, her hair had spent most of the latest road trip jammed up under a cap she'd picked up in Toronto for just that purpose, and it was largely free of anything but oil. Which, still-- ew.

 _Aw, shit_ , Jim thought suddenly, frowning. The hat was probably sitting dusty and crumpled under a table in a bar somewhere in the ass end of Iowa. She'd completely forgotten to look for it after her run in with Captain Christopher "Dare You To Do Better" Pike and his bullshit spiel. Which mustn't have been such bullshit, actually-- or Jim was as dumb as they'd always said she was-- because hell, she _had_ ended up in San Fran-fucking-cisco, hadn't she?

Jim lifted her chin and spat a last thin stream of water at the mirror through the gap between her loosened front teeth. Then she turned and stumbled out of the freshroom, wiping her mouth.

A quick glance of the rest of the apartment revealed that it was small as fuck and already halfway occupied. Jim slung her duffle onto the bed that looked least surrounded by somebody else's belongings. Sort of hitting where she'd aimed, the bag hit the edge of the mattress and bounced back off onto the floor with a weighty _thud_.

"Ugh. Suck."

Clumsy with exhaustion, Jim kicked off her boots and toed them under the bed, shedding clumps of Iowa mud on the floor. Her joints creaked as she bent painfully over the duffle, each miserable ache reminding Jim of the mosaic of purple contusions on her back and stomach.

She upended the bag on her bed, releasing a tangled heap of clothing, PADDs, trinkets, soap and combs, old-fashioned books, credit chips and packets of freeze-dried protein nibs. Picking out a shirt that smelled reasonably clean through even her fourth-time broken nose, Jim shed her jacket and stripped off her grungy t-shirt with a moan of pain. Upside down, the tesselation of bruises on her stomach looked kind of like the Eta Carinae Nebula-- she'd seen it once from an astrolab in Saskatchewan and never forgotten the sight.

"What the _hell_ are you--"

Jim's bra hit the floor about the same time the man's jaw did, leaving them staring at each other in dumbstruck silence.

"This happens a lot around me," she said frankly, pulling her shirt back on. "You'll get used to it. Jim Kirk, remember? You puked on me in the shuttle."

If it was possible, his eyes got even wider. Then he looked away sharply, scrubbing a hand over his bloodshot eyes. A recruit who looked even more messed up then she did-- was Starfleet grouping roommates together by blood alcohol level or something? In the light of day, the guy looked even sicker than he had right before he'd upchucked his guts all over her lap, if somewhat less outright insane. His face was stubbly with beard and still an unhealthy shade of grey.

McKay?-- Mikyle?-- all she could remember was some bitter one-off about bones.

"Don't tell me you have gynecomastia," Bones said, looking nothing short of incredulous. "That's near unheard of since the twenty-second century."

Jim stared. "No, moron, I'm a woman."

Bones' mouth worked incredulously for a bit-- probably as he mentally re-ran the few seconds where she'd flashed him in light of the revelation that he'd actually seen her tits. After he had computed that, somehow the only thing he could bark out was, "Then why are we in the same room and why the _hell_ are you named _Jim_?"

"Because I'm an iron-clad dyke with bigger, brassier balls than half the guys whose girlfriends I steal," Jim responded flatly, cocking her hips forward as she jammed her hands on them, mouth hard. "And some dickhead coordinator probably figured Jim Kirk had to be a guy and assigned me here without looking at the pretty little box marked 'in possession of tits and a cunt'. Really, I don't give a fuck either way. As for rooming together, here's the deal: I'm going to walk out of the shower naked, leave my lingerie all over the floor between laundry days and probably end up screwing somebody on your bed when I'm too drunk to see straight. That all right with you?"

And Jim knew that she and Bones were going get along just fine when he snapped back, looking a little bit deranged in his utter horror, " _Hell_ no. Do you know how unsanitary that all is? Do you _know_ how long some of these alien pathogens can survive on fabric covered in bodily fluids? I don't want any of the diseases you could track back in here incubating in the mattress I have to sleep on!"

She did have to wonder if he was a little bit gay, but still. Best friends forever right there.


End file.
